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The easy solution to this problem is to go to Google Maps, insert your location (38.897244,-77.0413344) and then "search nearby" for wakeboards manually. The full search results on the website usually draw attention to the exact match.

I did so and my results suggest that Marshfield Associates is coming up because findthebest.com is keyword spamming on their business listings and "wakeboards" happened to be one of the keywords spammed on that page. Unfortunately, false positives like this are common on Google Maps, because location is weighted so heavily -- on a normal web search, keyword spam like this wouldn't even make the top 1000.

The other obvious false positives are also on findthebest.com with exactly the same keyword spam text (which is rather unusual and may point to a technical malfunction on the part of that site). Here's a link that should go to the exact search I'm looking at: http://g.co/maps/2ny2p see H, I and J.

So, in other word, I'm not doing anything wrong? How do I get results to come back that look more like the maps results then?
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WilliamfApr 22 '12 at 11:47

You are not doing anything wrong. Your results should be the same as the Maps results in terms of ordering. As far as getting the full results that include the excerpts of text from the destination pages as Google sees them, though, I don't think it's possible with the API call you're using. You might need to additionally use Place Details Request on specific businesses after the search call. I haven't tried using Details Request myself so I can't say if the results will show exactly the same thing as the website, but it's probably the closest analogue.
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Andrew GorcesterApr 22 '12 at 15:41

When I say "more like", I mean ordering.. On the maps page, I'm getting the "wakeboard shops" first. My API call returns the finance firms first. Obviously, the results that the web interface provides is preferable. Is it a distance thing maybe? Am i not wide enough?
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WilliamfApr 22 '12 at 16:08

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It is a distance thing, yes. There are no legitimate wakeboarding shops in the DC city limits. Check the page I linked in the answer to see what I'm seeing.
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Andrew GorcesterApr 22 '12 at 16:11